Chapter 10 - The Summer of '68
Family tragedy, and Carrying On
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From the second seat of the Super Cub, Walter shifted his glance from the gauges to the ground below. His boss, Al, was in the seat ahead of him, flying the aircraft. Al had a keen interest in learning to fly, and he knew Walter was a flight instructor. On the occasions when both men were at the Ross River base, and could fit in a training flight, they did so.
The Super Cub had a tandem-seat configuration – two seats, one behind the other, with controls at both positions. When carrying cargo, the pilot might choose to fly from either the front or the rear seat to balance the load. The setup also worked well for flying lessons.
Al had become capable in the air, and was pretty good on his approach, but as soon as the wheels touched down, he became far too heavy on the rudder pedals, pitching the plane around on the small gravel airstrip. Often, Walter had to take over command to straighten it out, to prevent the plane from doing a ground-loop – spinning around in the gravel. Al grew more frustrated with the rough landings over time, and the more frustrated he became, the heavier his feet were on the pedals.
On this landing, he had the plane swinging back and forth like mad in the gravel. When Walter quietly took over to straighten it out, Al burst out, “That’s the problem! I just get everything lined up, then you mess with it, and I lose control!”
Walter, focused on recovering the landing, quipped, “You can’t lose something you never had.”
Once the plane came to a stop and they climbed out, Walter realized his little joke hadn’t landed well. His boss seemed furious, storming away from the plane without a word. Although Al asked to fly with Walter a few more times later in the season, their relationship had soured.
Walter reflected on it from time to time. He wondered why his comment had provoked such a reaction. Word was, the company was hemorrhaging cash that season, so perhaps his words carried a double meaning for Al, making them more insulting than he’d intended. Walter and Al rarely crossed paths, as Walter was often out in the bush for days at a time, and Al had a dedicated plane and pilot, Bob Cameron, for his own work. There was little opportunity for further conversation, and future lessons were strictly business.
One August afternoon, Walter was flying clients up north of Watson Lake. He had just landed when a call came over the radio from Spartan’s expediter, the fellow responsible for coordinating field communications. Walter heard the hesitation in his voice and knew something was wrong. The expediter relayed a message from the RCMP: Walter’s brother had died in a car accident.
The words struck him like a physical blow. His limbs went numb, and the radio felt heavy in his hand. He had three brothers. The youngest, Bobby, wasn’t even old enough to drive. His brother John was more of a risk-taker and had already been in several car accidents, so Walter’s thoughts went to him first. But deep down, his intuition told him it was his brother Norm. The RCMP hadn’t given a name, only the message.
Walter gathered himself. He needed to fly down to Watson Lake, where he could contact his family. Over the phone, his father confirmed the devastating news, it was Norman who had died. It had taken time for the RCMP to track Walter down, and by then the rest of the family was already gathering in Kelowna. In a haze, he boarded a Canadian Pacific flight to Edmonton, beginning the journey home to join them.
The days that followed were heavy with grief. Walter felt helpless as he witnessed his mother’s devastation. The way the news had reached the family had only deepened her pain. Norman had finished an afternoon shift at his job as a welder and was driving back to Surrey late at night when his car struck a concrete abutment. In the middle of the night, when the phone rang at the Harms household in Kelowna, the voice on the line said they were from Royal Columbian Hospital, and that Norman had been in an accident. They assured Mary that it didn’t seem very serious.
A few hours later, the phone rang again. This time, the same voice on the line said they were very sorry, but Norman had died. The whiplash of emotions, the relief of thinking he was fine, followed by the finality of his death, made the news even harder to bear. It was later determined that he had died of a cerebral hemorrhage from a head injury, but that detail offered no solace.
The day of the funeral was almost unbearable. Norman was several years younger than Walter, but the two had grown close in recent years, especially after becoming roommates in Surrey. After the service, Walter stayed with his family for a few days but then had to return to the Yukon to finish the season with Spartan Exploration.
When he arrived back in Ross River, he was relieved to be back, but grief had followed him. He thew himself back into the work. He noticed there was a new pilot in camp. Bob, the previous pilot, had a primary job as an apprentice maintenance engineer for the Trans North Bell helicopter that Spartan contracted, and that work pulled him away from flying.
Walter recognized the pilot who replaced Bob. Like Walter, flying was Dick Everson’s second career. He had worked for a few years as a police officer in Vancouver before buying himself a plane and hiring Walter to teach him to fly it. Walter’s certification as a flight instructor allowed him to offer private lessons on the side while he had worked for Harrison Airways, as he was doing these days for Al in Ross River.
Even with interesting work and new experiences every day to keep his mind occupied, it was a somber period for Walter. There were many reminders of Norman. The life insurance they had taken out on the trailer in Surrey paid off the mortgage, but it was cold comfort. In time, John offered to buy the trailer. He and his wife Shirl thought they could restore it – make something of it – maybe live in it themselves. Walter agreed to the offer. John and Shirl put in a good effort, but the trailer had thin walls and a basic frame, so there was only so much they could do to improve it. They lived in it for a while but eventually sold it again.
When the work with Spartan ended that fall, around the beginning of October, Walter and Dick flew the two Super Cubs back down to Vancouver for the winter. Along the way, they stopped in Ketchikan, Alaska, where two women who had been friends of Norman were working on nursing contracts. Visiting the women was a nice connection to Norman, and the conversation occasionally drifted back to anecdotes and stories that included him. Walter was glad they had stopped to visit.
That night, he and Dick stayed in Ketchikan, before carrying on to Vancouver the following morning. They stayed in a hotel that had a waterfall flowing beneath part of the building. After months of living outdoors in bush camps, the comfort of the hotel felt almost foreign. They opened all the windows in their room to ease the feeling of being closed in, and to listen to the waterfall outside.
Walter returned to Kelowna for the winter and went to work with his brother-in-law, Corny – Margaret’s husband. Corny was a builder, and he always had projects on the go. He handled everything from pouring the concrete for the foundation to bringing a house to “lock-up”, a complete structure, with windows and doors installed. From there, the tradesmen; plumbers, electricians, and finishing carpenters, would take over.
Corny always worked alongside a two-man crew, and he usually brought a house to lock-up in just eleven days on average. The reason he could build so quickly was that all the houses were the same. He called them “1080s” – their square footage – and they sold for about $8000.00. If the buyer wanted a garage, that cost a little more; if they wanted a roof overhanging the deck, that was extra. Walter thought the deal was a lot like buying a car; you start with the base model, then add options.
Because the houses were all built from the same plan, Corny could prepare many of the building components in bulk ahead of time. At home in the evenings, he would cut headers, angles, and other pieces so that when the crew arrived on-site, everything was ready to nail into place the next morning. He must have worked half the night to keep up, but it made the job go quickly. Corny was a workaholic through and through, but Walter was no stranger to hard work, so the two got along well.
That fall, Corny had a special project on his plate – he was building a new house for Walter’s parents, and there was nothing standard about that one. Jake had subdivided the orchard and sold off some lots on the lower bench. He and Mary had chosen a lot on the upper bench for their new home. John helped them pick out a building plan, and Corny, Walter, and John set to work.
They started in October, staking out the footprint of the house. A backhoe operator was hired to dig out the basement, and then the work began in earnest. The weather did not cooperate. Heavy rain persisted through the fall, and although the lumber was semi-dry when they bought it, it became soaking wet as the build progressed. Just after the men poured the floor for the carport, a cold spell settled in, heaving and cracking the new concrete. Still, they persisted, and slowly the house came together.
They plumbed the home for natural gas heating, but it took time to get the gas hooked up. In the meantime, Jake used a tank of propane to run the furnace. He was alarmed at how quickly they burned through the fuel; the house was drying out, in some places steam rose from the surfaces as they dried.
“Man, I don’t know if we’ll be able to afford to heat this place,” Jake said one day after checking the propane tank. Fortunately, once the building materials dried out, and the natural gas line was connected, the cost of heating came right down. The house was comfortable and affordable.
Once that project was done, Corny went back to his regular, “1080” builds, and Walter went with him. He welcomed the work through the winter, even if the weather made it more miserable than usual. It was good to keep busy until he could head north again. The charter season in the North usually started in April or May, when the ice cleared off the lakes and floatplanes could operate.
In the spring of 1969, Walter found work with Gateway Aviation, a general charter company based out of Edmonton, Alberta. He was hired to fly chartered flights from an air base in Fort Smith, Northwest Territories.
In preparation for the season, he bought a camper for his ’64 Ford truck, thinking it would be a practical solution for housing through the summer. He drove to Edmonton, where a senior pilot checked him out on a Cessna 206. He learned that Edmonton was the main base for Gateway, and that was where all the senior pilots flew. Fort Smith was a forward base, and junior pilots like Walter started up there.
His first assignment was to fly the Cessna 206 to Fort Smith. Worried about leaving his truck and camper behind in Edmonton, he asked about housing. Staff told him Gateway had a rented house for crew. They called it the “pilot house”, and he could stay there temporarily until he found an opportunity to return to Edmonton to get his truck and camper. With this information, he arranged to leave the truck and camper at his Uncle Henry’s farm near Edmonton, then flew north in the Cessna. He was eager to begin his second season as a bush pilot.
It didn’t take him long to get oriented to the job in Fort Smith. Gateway Aviation was a charter outfit that handled a bit of everything; Walter and the other pilots flew prospectors and trappers out to the bush, transported government workers, doctors and nurses to remote Native communities, and carried clients for guiding outfits around the Territories. When forest fire season began, Gateway supported the fire crews.
Gateway shared the air base in Fort Smith with several other charter companies operating in the North, as well as a couple of docks on “Instant Lake” for the floatplanes. Instant Lake was just a slough with only a foot of water, a muck bottom and lots of vegetation. The joke was, if you just added water, you’d have a lake – hence the nickname, “Instant Lake”. Float planes had no trouble landing on it, the muck was soft and slick. The guys called it “loon shit”, but the sludge was formed from rotting plants. Standing on the edge of the dock, you could probe down through the muck with a pole a good twelve feet before hitting anything solid.
There was always something going on at the base in Fort Smith, or perhaps it just seemed livelier on account of the Gateway base manager, a guy named Barney. Walter had been around guys like him before, fellows who did more talking than listening. Most of the pilots had a tense relationship with Barney, but Walter kept things civil. He kept Barney at arm’s length, and they got along alright.
It didn’t take Walter long to realized that his colleagues’ frustration ran deeper than Barney. The entire management team seemed to have a strained relationship with their pilots. The main sticking point was vacation time, or rather, the lack of it. There was no paid vacation, and no pay in lieu of time off.
For Walter, and most of the other pilots in Fort Smith, it wasn’t a big concern. They were very junior, and weren’t there for the time off; they were there to get their foot in the door, and to work. But he understood why the senior pilots, who worked year-round from the Edmonton base, were starting to get prickly about it.
Not long after Walter arrived in Fort Smith, matters came to a head between the pilots in Edmonton, and Gateway management. Even up in Fort Smith, stories moved back and forth between the crews, though Walter thought they were probably quite embellished by the time they made it that far north. He heard one of the senior pilots in Edmonton, representing the rest of the crew, went to talk out the vacation issue with the head office.
The story the guys in Fort Smith heard was that of a brief and unfruitful exchange. The pilot representative had met with Gateway’s top man, and told him directly that the company needed either to pay in lieu of vacation or grant vacation days to employees. According to the pilot, the boss replied with something along the lines of, “No chance. Pilots are a dime a dozen.”
The story went that the pilot pulled a dime out of his pocket, flicked it across the office floor, and said, “Well, here’s a dime – go get yourself a dozen pilots. We’re leaving.”
The account became more dramatic with each retelling, but in the end, the pilots didn’t leave. They kept on working, and the matter eventually escalated to the Labour Relations Board.
Walter noted the tense relations between management and the pilots, but he kept his head down and did his work. He was piling on hours in the Cessna 206 and occasionally flying other planes that Gateway’s fleet as well. His time flying old junker planes for Ed Zelesky was serving him well; he had experience on a wide range of aircraft, which made him a valuable employee. He enjoyed the varied work and the opportunity to see so much of Canada’s vast North as he flew one job after another.
Occasionally, a plane needed service that the local mechanic couldn’t manage, and it needed to be flown down to Edmonton. Walter volunteered to take one down that needed to stay a while, so he could drive his truck and camper up to Fort Smith. When he returned, he pulled the camper off the truck and set it up in the yard of the “pilot house”. Not long after, one of the other pilots, John Langdon, living there had his wife come to visit him. John had been a bush pilot in the past and had recently returned to the work. He was a calm, quiet guy, and Walter respected him. When John’s wife was due to arrive, he told the rest of the guys he didn’t want his wife staying in a house full of “bush apes” as the pilots referred to each other. He asked them to clear out of the house for a few days. They obliged and for Walter it was no issue, he simply moved out to his camper in the yard, until John’s wife returned home.
One evening, one of the pilots returned to the house with a story to tell. He had flown a fellow from Water Resources that day, who told him of a flight some of his colleagues had recently experienced with John Langdon. He said Langdon was flying them across the Peel Plateau in an Otter, when the engine quit. The Peel Plateau is a vast area covered in a blanket of trees, unsuited to emergency landings. The guys were alarmed, but saw John flick a switch, then restart the engine. This went one a couple of times, with the engine quitting every few minutes, the Otter losing altitude each time. The guys were getting pretty unsettled by the situation.
After a few cycles of this, Langdon turned to look back at them, “She’s acting up a little,” he said, before turning back to his controls.
That level of nonchalance was a classic, even for bush pilots.
After numerous cycles of the engine cutting out, and Langdon restarting it, they made it to a safe place to land, and had a great story to tell.
The guy said that incident had happened recently. John returned to the house in the same manner every evening, calm and quiet. Walter had no idea what day that rather notable event had happened to his colleague.
Much more detail about the troubled flight became available, as it ended up being a police matter. The cause of the repeated engine failures was alleged to be sabotage. Someone had placed strips of plastic film in the fuel tanks. The plastic strips occluded the fuel intake, killing the engine. The Otter had three fuel tanks. Each time the engine quit, John switched tanks and restarted the engine. When he switched tanks, the plastic drifted away from the intake in the first tank, but once the engine started sucking fuel in the next tank, the plastic in that tank occluded the intake, and the engine stalled again. John had carried on switching tanks until he could safely land.
Walter admired John’s calmness in the face of what could have easily been a crisis. He was learning that his job as a pilot was to make each flight as routine, as boring, even, for his passengers as was possible. When emergencies arose, his job was to manage the issue and reassure passengers. He wasn’t sure he could manage John’s level of calm, but he was up for the challenge.
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Author’s Notes:
N.B.1: We often see our parents through the lens of their roles in our lives— caregivers, disciplinarians, cheerleaders. Perhaps they are our role models or mentors, but who were they before they became these things to us?”
To better understand who my parents were before they were, well, my parents, I set about interviewing them about their lives before marriage and kids. I started with my mom, and you can read her story here, and now, “Learning to Fly” is the story of my dad.
Walter Harms was the oldest son of Mary and Jake Harms, Mennonites who fled to Canada in search of safety and the hope for a better future. He was a curious child, always interested in the land they lived on, and how things worked. As a young man, this curiosity led him to respond to an advertisement for flying lessons, and the rest, as they say, is history.
Walter is my dad, and this is his story, as told to me in a series of interviews in 2024-25. The story is pieced together from Dad’s memory, photos, and documents. As we all know, memory is fallible. In the telling of this story, some names have been changed, either because they could not be recalled, or to protect the privacy of the person.
N.B.2: A special thanks to Bob Cameron, who responded to my online request for information about events during the time of this chapter. He was Al Kulan’s personal pilot in 1968, and offered details from that time that Dad hadn’t previously recalled. and also provided photographs of Dad and the Super Cubs that they flew that season.
N.B.3: Al Kulan, Walter’s boss at Spartan Explorations LTD was a well known figure in the North. He was a prospector involved in the development of the Faro mine, a project that made a lot of men in the day very wealthy, including Al. By the time Walter met him, Al and his partners were working multiple other claims, including the uranium exploration conducted through Spartan Explorations. In 1977, he was shot dead in a bar in Ross River, in front of stunned onlookers, bringing his name back into the news in a shocking way.
Al Kulan was inducted into the Yukon Hall of Fame in 1988, and the Canadian Mining Hall of Fame in 2005. There is a short story about his interesting life in the “Yukon Nugget.